Trio Grotesk from Bold Monday

Posted June 13, 2013

The second release from our Dutch foundry partner Bold Monday is Trio Grotesk. And it is one with an interesting Dutch background, too.

While studying in the Netherlands, Trio Grotesk’s designer Florian Schick discovered the only two remaining printed copies of Dutch modernist Piet Zwart’s influential essay Van oude tot nieuwe typografie (From Old to New Typography) in book museum Meermanno in The Hague. It was printed by Drukkerij Trio and set in an early 20th-century sans serif — Kaart Antiek. Schick decided to revive the typeface, and very closely that is, incorporating the typical rounding and ink spread of the 7 point letterpress printed text in his model. The result is Trio Grotesk — a charming rounded sans serif of broad proportions with a discreet modernist feel.

The fonts are optimized for our medium size range (14 px+) and lend themselves particularily well for all-caps settings. The character set consists of as many as 688 glyphs with Latin 1 and 2 language support as well as numerous symbols like arrows, manicules, various sets of figures, and a series of Dutch countryside themed pictograms, accessible via their unicode value. If you don’t want to make use of the full character set, you can subset the fonts in your account settings to reduce the file size. Trio Grotesk combines well with many text fonts, for instance the similarly round Apres RE or old-style Poynter Serif RE.

As with all fonts on Webtype, Trio Grotesk can be tested free of charge for 30 days. For more details, see the Trio Grotesk webfont page. For information about the desktop fonts and images of Trio Grotesk’s lovely printed specimen book, check out Bold Monday’s website.